You cannot fail to have noticed that in most American films and TV shows, all the phone numbers start 555. This is a reserved number in the North American Numbering Plan. It means that it's a number which will never connect to a real person or service. So you can avoid the situation where a number is spoken on a show, or in a song, and everyone tries to call it - much to the annoyance of the owner of the number. That's the US - did you know the UK also has a similar set of reserved numbers? …
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This was the sign that greeted me as I made my way into The Camden Head for the first Museums Showoff... Now, I've no idea why I was the headliner - but I certainly wasn't going to complain! Museums Showoff is a spin-off from the popular Science Showoff. The idea is that ten speakers come along and show off. They chat about what they're doing, things they've made, stuff they've built, or anything that gets their juices flowing. With the permission of the participants, I recorded the event. …
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I've been listening to the Leveson inquiry. A large part of the exchanges seem to go like this: Jay: Turning to page 51. Witness: Which bundle? Jay: 1606. Witness: 1660? Leveson: No, the page after. Jay: Paragraph 7. Witness: I don't have a paragraph 7. Jay: Ah, I have an earlier print out. Leveson: You'll find it in tab 15. Witness: Is this Volume 2? And so on, ad nauseum. Surely there's no reason to have so much paper wastefully printed and then discarded? Why not a single reference…
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No, I'm not talking about Masabi's innovative technology, but of this rather odd bit of advertising found on the back of a train ticket. There's no specific call to action - but there's not much space to play with. Let's give it a scan... sigh A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the top right which won't work on any iPhones. Why on Earth do marketing companies insist on pointing phones to non-mobile sites. It really bemuses me. Stations rarely have good signal (too many people …
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OAuth was designed to combat an anti-pattern. Typing your username and password into a third party site is bad idea. A really bad idea. I mean, you may think it's a bad idea to give your bank details to a Nigerian prince but that's just peanuts compared to giving away your password to an untrusted site! So, that's why we use OAuth. Rather than handing details to a random site, we authenticate against a trusted site which then redirects us back with an authentication token. That's all well…
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My good friend Richard Brent has often complained that my blog has very little Shakespeare content. Despite the domain name, I don't think I've ever blogged about The Big S. For shame! Fear not, my Brentish-Boy, this post is all about Shakespeare. And MySQL.... Ahem... When I first started shkspr.mobi it was intended to be an easy way to get Shakespeare on your phone. At that time, there were no mobile formatted texts of his plays and sonnets, so I had to create them. Finding…
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We live in a world of our own creation. This means we can find it inconceivable that outsiders don't know the acronyms we use daily. How can anyone possibly live without understanding what we do? Customers don't understand your company's acronyms, processes, or business model. It's worse than that, though - most users don't even recognise your company's name! Here's a great example. In Zinio's world, everyone knows who Zinio are. They live in Zinio town, drink Zinio coffee from the Zinio…
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Here's a simple way to copy files to and from your BlackBerry PlayBook when you're using Ubuntu. This should work with any form of Linux. This is a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots. On The PlayBook Plug your PlayBook into your Linux computer using a USB cable. You may see this screen (or similar) you can dismiss it. In the Settings menu, scroll down to "Storage & Sharing". Ensure that the "USB Connections" is set to "Connect to Windows". Scroll down and make sure that "File…
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In a mixed paradigm environment, how do you ensure content is surfaced which is context specific? By which I mean - how do you make your content serve the user's time-bound constraints? What I'm trying to say is - serendipitous discovery must be restricted based on temporal imperatives. Or, to break it down further, a user may only have a specific amount of time to dedicate to your app; how do you deal with that? In a mobile game, the interface may present the user a choice of "Quick Play"…
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On Thursday, I attended my first TeaCamp. It's a mini-meetup for UK Gov folk doing interesting digital things. These are some random jotterings based on the discussions both at the event and at BeerCamp afterwards. All conversations were under Chatham House Rules. Social Media is a problem for all organisations - whether public or private. Rightly or wrongly, the "public" see an organisation as having a single mind and a single focus. Anything which gives the impression of a lack of unit…
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Image adaptation and resizing is a hot topic at the moment. With devices of varying screensize accessing your site, how do you ensure that the crappy 240*240 phone gets a reasonable experience while still making everything look gorgeous on the retina-busting iPad? One of the very first things we're taught in HTML school is that we should separate content and style. <span font="comic sans" colour="red">This is wrong!</span> Instead, we should be doing <span class="stylish">This is…
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